15a Refining your plans
Contents:
Moving from working thesis to explicit thesis
Asking questions about your thesis
Planning design
Video Prompt: When to stop researching
You should by now have notes containing facts, opinions, paraphrases, summaries, quotations, and other material; you probably have images or media to integrate as well. You may also have ideas about how to synthesize these many pieces of information. And you should have some sense of whether your hypothesis has sufficient support. Now is the time to reconsider your purpose, audience, stance, and working thesis.
- What is your central purpose? What other purposes, if any, do you have?
- What is your stance toward your topic (2d)? Are you an advocate, a critic, a reporter, an observer?
- What audience(s) are you addressing (2e and 10b)?
- How much background information or context does your audience need?
- What supporting information will your readers find most convincing?
- Should your tone be that of a colleague, an expert, a friend?
- How can you establish common ground with your readers and show them that you have considered points of view other than your own? (See 9f and Chapter 28.)
- What is your working thesis trying to establish? Will your audience accept it?
Moving from working thesis to explicit thesis
Writing out an explicit thesis statement allows you to articulate your major points and to see how well they carry out your purpose and appeal to your audience. Depending on the purpose, audience, and genre of your project, you may or may not decide to include the explicit thesis in your final draft—but developing your working thesis into an explicit statement can still be very useful.
David Craig, the student whose research appears throughout Part 3, developed the following explicit thesis statement (see Chapter 32):
Instant messaging seems to be a positive force in the development of youth literacy because it promotes regular contact with words, the use of a written medium for communication, and the development of an alternative form of literacy.
Asking questions about your thesis
Although writing out an explicit thesis will often confirm your research, you may find that your hypothesis is invalid, inadequately supported, or insufficiently focused. In such cases, you need to rethink your original research question and perhaps do further research. To test your thesis, consider the following questions:
- How can you state your thesis more precisely or more clearly (3c)? Should the wording be more specific? Could you use more specific, concrete nouns (30c) or stronger verbs (53b)? Should you add qualifying adjectives or adverbs (Chapter 42)?
- In what ways will your thesis interest your audience? What can you do to increase that interest (2e)?
- Will your thesis be manageable, given your limits of time and knowledge? If not, what can you do to make it more manageable?
- What evidence from your research supports each aspect of your thesis? What additional evidence do you need?
Planning design
As you move toward producing a draft, take some time to think about how you want your research project to look. What font will you use? Should you use color? Do you plan to insert text boxes and visuals? Will you need headings and subheadings? Will you incorporate audio, video, or other media? (For more on design, see Chapter 16.)
For Multilingual Writers: Asking experienced writers to review a thesis